In any case, I consider modern Hebrew to be a conlang based on a natural language.
I see where you're coming from, with that, but I think it's actually even more interesting than that. Prior to Hebrew being spoken as a native language again, you had different groups of Jews in Palestine, coming from different linguistic backgrounds (the main divisions, obviously, being Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim, Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephardim, and Judeo-Arabic-speaking Mizrahim, though there were plenty of other folks, including Ashkenazim who spoke German rather than Yiddish, Persian-speaking Jews, etc) who needed a language to use in common, and Hebrew, a sort of pidginised, lingua franca form of Hebrew, was that. And everyone brought to the table what they had gotten from their particular native languages. So when people started raising their kids speaking Hebrew, they already sort of had a community of adult speakers to influence them. The difference was, relative to other situations like this (out of which creole languages are formed), there was a good deal more literacy, and more awareness of the history of Hebrew, and what 'good' (literary, Bibical) Hebrew looks like. So you started out with a sort of a pidgin situation, followed by the insertion of native speakers, raised by non-native speakers of a variety of Hebrew that wasn't really pidginised at all. Initially, I'm sure utterances were somewhere in between the two, a kind of creole, but the situation was such that it was bound to be mostly decreolised. So really... it's probably most like Afrikaans.
It does sometimes remind me of Esperanto, though. I'd be curious to see what would happen if a small state were formed, with Esperanto as an official language. You'd get a similar mix of levels, and people bringing different things to the table, linguistically speaking, along with a very vague consensus on what the language should and shouldn't look/sound like.
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I see where you're coming from, with that, but I think it's actually even more interesting than that. Prior to Hebrew being spoken as a native language again, you had different groups of Jews in Palestine, coming from different linguistic backgrounds (the main divisions, obviously, being Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim, Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephardim, and Judeo-Arabic-speaking Mizrahim, though there were plenty of other folks, including Ashkenazim who spoke German rather than Yiddish, Persian-speaking Jews, etc) who needed a language to use in common, and Hebrew, a sort of pidginised, lingua franca form of Hebrew, was that. And everyone brought to the table what they had gotten from their particular native languages. So when people started raising their kids speaking Hebrew, they already sort of had a community of adult speakers to influence them. The difference was, relative to other situations like this (out of which creole languages are formed), there was a good deal more literacy, and more awareness of the history of Hebrew, and what 'good' (literary, Bibical) Hebrew looks like. So you started out with a sort of a pidgin situation, followed by the insertion of native speakers, raised by non-native speakers of a variety of Hebrew that wasn't really pidginised at all. Initially, I'm sure utterances were somewhere in between the two, a kind of creole, but the situation was such that it was bound to be mostly decreolised. So really... it's probably most like Afrikaans.
It does sometimes remind me of Esperanto, though. I'd be curious to see what would happen if a small state were formed, with Esperanto as an official language. You'd get a similar mix of levels, and people bringing different things to the table, linguistically speaking, along with a very vague consensus on what the language should and shouldn't look/sound like.